Overturning the Australia Genesis Libel

The unfortunate conflation of sovereignty and property that infects modern geopolitical discourse

Image: Captain Cook. Does Australia “belong” to anyone?

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Quick Glossary

Sovereignty: Controlling a territory.

Property: Ownership of a parcel of land (or a chattel or an idea).

Mere occupation: Living on a land regardless of personal ownership or control.

War: A means of gaining control/sovereignty of a territory.

Belonging: A colloquial word for the ownership of property.

Stealing: Taking the property of others.

Liberty: Where the right of property and pre-existing property rights are respected by the sovereign power, including after a change in the sovereign control of a territory.

Tyranny: Where private property is stolen by the sovereign power.

Does a sovereign power “own” a territory? No.

Can you “steal” a country in war? No.

Can a sovereign steal the property of those under its control? Yes.

Introduction

The conflation of sovereignty and property is a running theme of our time —and it’s having dangerous consequences. It led to the organised theft that was communism, and it is leading people from the United States to Australia to doubt the legitimacy of their countries.

So to be clear from the outset: The United States is a great and legitimate nation. Australia is a great and legitimate nation. And the Soviet Union was a tyranny of the first order. Let the fun begin…

Sovereignty

Sovereignty is a fancy word for the law of the jungle. If you exercise power over a territory, you exercise sovereignty. You may have gained sovereignty by fair means or foul. But simply by exercising power over a land; by being in control; you are sovereign.

Sovereignty isn’t a moral judgement. It’s a statement of fact. The house of Saud exercises sovereignty over the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. It just does. You may prefer they didn’t. Or you may thank your lucky stars that they are holding the fort against the Islamic Republic. But either way they exercise sovereignty. They have an army. They have powerful allies. They are in control. If another country invades them and overturns the status quo, then their sovereignty will be at an end and that will be that.

Every country that exists exercises its sovereignty due to violence. Normally violence in the long distant past. Sometimes violence much closer to our present time. And that  sovereignty is a zero-sum game; for me to exercise power, you will not. And given the limited territory on this finite planet, many people are going to lose out in the sovereignty game. The Kurds, the Tibetans, the Romany, the indigenous South Americans, the Egyptian Copts, and many besides, don’t exercise power over a land because either they lost out in a violent confrontation or they felt themselves too militarily weak to ever engage in one.

Violence as used here isn’t necessarily pejorative.  In a zero sum encounter, you no more legitimately have a right to a land than I; so why shouldn’t I fight to control it? Especially if I know that I will organise the running of the territory in a far more non-tyrannical way than you by respecting everyone’s right to property (more on this later).

The United States of America and her allies maintain a space for non-tyrannical government in this world through violence. Some Europeans may be too utopian and/or naive to admit it, but denial isn’t reality. If we don’t retain sovereignty by defending our territory, liberty is lost. 

Neo-conservatives have famously pushed the envelope, arguing that it would be justified to expand the territory of liberty by force. Notwithstanding the unlikelihood of that approach working in the Arab world as seen in Iraq debacle; and notwithstanding the fact the borders of sovereignty are frozen under the UN Charter provisions; I would definitely say this: that where prior to United Nations settlement a territory was taken by force, and consequently liberty was extended to that territory, there isn’t a case to answer.

When the British arrived in Australia and the colonists arrived in America, they merely took sovereignty from another in a pre-UN era when territorial control was a free-for-all. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t wrong. It just was. If the various Aboriginal nations had been strong enough, they would have come to Britain and colonised us. The Aztecs did indeed colonise their neighbours in what they thought was a mighty empire; until an even bigger army came along and overtook them. The Aztecs and the Spanish were both colonisers aiming to extend their sovereignty, and prior to the creation of the UN, this was a value-free fact of life.

Nowadays, we say - rightly or wrongly - that borders are sacrosanct, but then, no-one from the native Americans to the Germans to the Mongols to the Chinese took that modern stance. They took what they could get. And before the Europeans came on the scene, the native Hawaiians and the Central Americans Indians were busy colonising each other; and brutally so.

The question when assessing the USA, Australia, the Aztecs and the Mongols is not whether they exercised power over others without their consent. It is whether they respected - and where relevant, continue to respect - the liberty of their inhabitants. To be as blunt as one can be, they need to demonstrate that they respect the right of property.

Property, Tyranny & John Locke

Property is merrily conflated with sovereignty in the most cavalier of fashions. We say without thinking that Saudi Arabia “owns” the oil underneath its territory of sovereignty. It does not. It merely controls the territory. We say that Egypt “owns” the sand of the Sinai desert. It does not. It merely controls the territory.

We say that the Native Americans “owned” the land of North America in its entirety. They didn’t. They (a group of many different nations) merely controlled large amounts of the territory and its citizens owned a small part of it.

For owned is different to controlled. Owned is a question of property. And property is more than occupation or usage or passing through. It is using your own labour, your time and your effort to transform a piece of land or a raw material or an idea from what it once was to something new. When I walk through a forest, I don’t have any ownership of it. It belongs to God.

When Saudi Arabia wishes to extract oil from the ground it must invest in expertise from abroad who, in turn, spend time, effort and accumulated knowledge into making revenue from this natural resource. The Kingdom may levy taxes. The Kingdom may make conditions when it puts the contract out for tender. It may do - as the wise Sultan Qaboos of Oman did - and demand that local Saudis are trained in how to extract oil so that it develops its own fully locally-controlled industry bringing skilled employment in the process.

But it cannot, in good faith, take away the property rights of the company. If it nationalises without compensation, it steals. It takes what it was unable to do without the help of others. It uses the know-how of foreigners and then thieves from them with the but of a gun.

A hunter-gatherer who merely roams the forest and fishes in the rivers doesn’t own anything. He uses what the Creator provided to us all and adds nothing to it. A desert that lies empty, and without human activity, is owned by no-one, whether controlled by an Ottoman, Israeli, Arab or African overlord. Sand is ownerless. When a new sovereign takes control, they take power, but not property. 

It is time to revise John Locke, a man whose name has been dragged through the mud on the basis that he influenced the founders of the United States of America, the greatest State of liberty yet established. Locke’s formulation of property is utterly convincing. By exerting your labour, you gain rights to that which you fashion. Or else where you purchase that creation from he who efforts was expended, you must pay him monetary compensation. In Locke’s own words,

“Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. It being by him removed from the common state nature hath placed it in, it hath by this labour something annexed to it, that excludes the common right of other men. For this labour being the unquestionable property of the labourer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to, at least where there is enough, and as good, left in common for others.” (Two Treatises of Government, § 27). 

This is no mystical process. If we cannot rely on the fact that others will respect our hard work, sacrifice, dedication and innovation, we are lost as a civilisation. If anyone can take from us that which we have created, we live unfree. To take that which we have placed into our heart, soul and patience, is to offend against natural justice.

Those who conflate sovereignty and property ignore this key fact. The powers that be may change; the armies that parade our borders may change; those that we must pay tax to may change: but no new Empire or sovereign may take away my property.  If they do - as the Soviets and their communist minions did - they create more than an unfree society. They create more than an authoritarian government. They create pure tyranny. Putin, dictator as he is, is no Soviet tyrant….yet. He invades others. He tries to take sovereignty of foreign lands by force. But within his own borders; within the countries he controls willingly or unwillingly; he respects private property. At the moment. The time may yet come when he annuls private ownership. But until that day he no communist thief. Just a crony capitalist gangster.

Native Americans, Aborigines & Property

In determining the morality of the American and Australian enterprises, we are to ask the following. Did the people live there have private property? How much? Where was it? And did the settlers take it by force?

The answer to the first question is yes. They did have private property. They did exert their labour and change the environment around them. To quote extensively from https://www.creativespirits.info/aboriginalculture/land/aboriginal-houses in respect of the Australian case:

“An area near Portland in southwest Victoria has evidence of volcanic stone huts that date back thousands of years. The Gunditjmara Aboriginal people of that area developed an 'aquacultural system' made of fish traps and weirs which is thought to be among the world's oldest, covering an area of 100 square km, thus "dispelling the myth that Australia's Indigenous people were all nomadic".

On the opposite end of Australia, on the Dampier archipelago off Australia’s north-west coast, archeologists found evidence of stone houses dating back 9,000 years. The excavation of the circular stone foundations showed occupation was maintained throughout the ice age, and evidence of human occupation dating back 21,000 years.

….

The Budj Bim Cultural Landscape, in Gunditjmara land in south-west Victoria, is heritage-protected and on the UNESCO's World Heritage register as "one of the world’s most extensive and oldest aquaculture systems". For more than 6,000 years Aboriginal people harvested eel, smoked and traded the fish. They built channels, weirs and dams, and there are also remnants of at least 146 stone houses, evidence that suggests Aboriginal people "settled in villages".

…Author Paul Memmott has written the first book about "the Aboriginal Architecture Of Australia" exploring the range and complexity of Aboriginal-designed structures from minimalist shelters to permanent villages.

"Gunyah, Goondie and Wurley" (which are all names of (semi-)permanent Aboriginal structures) aims to introduce the lay reader to the subject and provide insight into the lifestyles and cultural heritage of Aboriginal peoples.

According to Paul Memmott, many of the huts and shelters Aboriginal people built were dome structures. In the rainforest area around Cairns, in Queensland, where there was heavy rain for much of the year, people would occupy such villages for up to a year.

Some of the houses had triple layers of cladding and insulation. In western Victoria, Aboriginal people built circular stone walls more than a metre high, constructing dome roofs over the top with earth or sod cladding.”

However, none of this means that the entirety of Australia was “aboriginal land”. Most of Australia was totally uninhabited as it remains to this day. Like their European successors, they mainly lived on the coast and were focused in the South-Eastern region, centred upon the Murray River. Their population was between 300,000 and 3,000,000. It was significant, yes, but tiny compared the vastness of the Australian continent. Like the British they were dwarfed by the landscape. 

The Aborigines had property and this has been recognised by the Australia courts. To the extent that any of it was stolen by the settlers, that was act of pure tyranny and their descendants must be fully compensated. But they didn’t have title to the Western Australian deserts for example. That was unowned. And indeed most of Australia - particularly those parts away from the coast - was a territory without owners. The arrival of the British was merely a case of a change of sovereign. And if the British hadn't come, the Aboriginal people would merely have exchanged sovereignty among themselves. Violently. For - and I repeat - sovereignty isn’t ownership. 

Australia will be judged historically by how it respects Aboriginal property rights. What it should never be judged for though is doing in the long past what every other human power has done through time: take territory by force of arms.

The world has changed now. But it hadn’t then; for the Aborigines as much as for the British. And if a white farmer took a piece of land in New South Wales that was uncultivated, unsettled and unowned and by his own hand transformed it into a flourishing farm, that has become his property. No-one who respects natural rights has the legitimate power to take it away from him.

It’s our land!

No it isn’t.

How many times have we heard this refrain and in so many contexts. It’s Jewish land! It’s Palestinian land! It’s Native American land! It’s black African land! Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. And wrong. Land belongs to no-one at all unless and until it becomes the property of another. And property is effort, labour, time, innovation and development.

That your people or my people; European or a Russian; a Mongol or an Ottoman had sovereignty over a piece of territory at some point in the near or distant past may create a connection or a bond, but it doesn’t make the land yours. The desert sands and the rugged hills are no-one’s. They are without owner.

That your people or my people; European or a Russian; a Mongol or an Ottoman occupied or roamed over or hunted in a piece of territory at some point in the near or distant past may create a connection or a bond, but it doesn’t make the land yours. The deep ravines and the flowing streams are no-one’s. They are without owner.  

What matters is property.

Take the Holy Land. Whichever Empire had sovereignty over that land in the near or distant past - and neither the Arabs nor the Jews had sovereignty for many, many centuries prior to 1948 - is irrelevant. What counts is who owned what. And the truth is that the majority of the land was owned by no-one at all, be they Jewish or Arabs, Ottoman or British

That which was owned was owned by a wide range of people. Some Jewish. Some Arab. Absentee Ottoman landlords and foreign churches. Some by the Russian Empire and some by the Catholic church.

There were many Arab tenants who enjoyed leasehold property rights. But that which was owned was bought legitimately subject to Ottoman, then British Law.

There was previous unowned swamps and deserts that were turned into property by Jewish ingenuity (as per Locke). But - and I say it again - much of the land wasn’t owned by anyone.   

Where property is stolen, that is tyranny. So where the seizure of private property is proven in Australia, the USA, the Holy Land, Zimbabwe or elsewhere, that is a wrong that must - as a matter of natural law - be undone through full monetary compensation.

Now, in the Middle Eastern case, private property was seized in a existential war following a UN-approved declaration of self-determination; as such the declaration of sovereignty isn’t an issue. But the issue of property must be resolved. Monetary compensation is due to the previous owners - Arab, Turk, British or whoever - and that also applies to Jewish property in the MENA (not to mention the pre-1948 West Bank).

Yet compensation is quite different from the idea that specific physical sites should be “given back”. Because that property has immensely increased in value due to the effort and labour of the post-war owners.

Zimbabwe is another example. I don’t know whether the original white farmers stole property or whether they just created property from previously unowned land. It depends on the individual case. But Robert Mugabe and Zanu-PF had no right to just “take the land back”.

If the land was unowned previously he had no right whatsoever; he was a tyrant.

If the land is proved to have been previously owned, once more the descendants of the original dispossessed are entitled to monetary compensation for the original value increased to account for inflation. 

But to take the land is to steal. That land, that was turned into thriving farms, that fed the Zimbabwean nation by the effort and expertise of its farmers, has vastly increased in valiue.

And how about Manhattan? It is highly disputable that the Lenape people had any property in the territory, simply by virtue of having roamed and fished there. But whatever the truth, the territory has been VASTLY improved through VAST human effort. Are the descendants of the Lenape hunters and gatherers entitled to take over New York? Of course not. If they had property there, they are entitled to compensation for the original - relatively meagre - value.

The Importance of Self-Determination

The importance of this issue isn’t merely historical. It impacts directly on how we view our nations. Are we guilt-ridden aberrations; formed in unforgivable original sin? Or rather were we sovereign powers that, unlike our Eurasian, African and Latin American competitors made an attempt to respect private property?

More than this, it helps us to crystallize the importance of self-determination in talking of international affairs. Theocrats locate legal legitimacy in the divine. Authoritarians seek the same in the person of the State. Yet the Anglosphere has a different response —an answer that changed the course of history. We say that legitimate political authority derives from the people. And not, as the revolutionary French would have in the dictator-expressed common will of the People, but rather in the person of each consenting individual.

Thus understood, Aboriginal and Inuit self-determination is not sovereign-dependant. It matters not from whence Syrian power is exercised (by a Sunni tyrant or a French imperialist) if the individual people are unfree. It is the consent of the governed - and the respect of their life, liberty and property - that determines true self-determination. Without freedom, specifically liberty, we are all in chattels, no matter the ethnicity of our jailer.

When judging America, Australia and the nationless states of Pax Arabica, we need but ask one question: Are the people free? More specifically: Are they free NOW? When the Iraqi authorities ethnically cleansed its Jews and expropriated their power, they showed Iraqi “self-determination” to be sham, a Wittgensteinian language game without objective truth. If minority liberty and property were better respected under British colonial rule, then the Iraqi people were more free, and more able to self-determine, under that foreign, European sovereign. Slavery is slavery no matter your master’s skin colour.

If the Arabs really believed in self-determination, they would welcome back the Jews as citizens and restore their property. The Kurds and other minorities would be permitted to live as they choose, liberated from the Arabist whip.

That the Arabs are a majority in the Northern Middle East is now a fait accompli. We can do no other but respect their sovereignty. Yet sovereignty isn’t freedom and without freedom, self-determination is dead. We can, and must, expect the Arab majority to act non-tyrannically: to safeguard the life, liberty and property of all their citizens.

I ask not what I do not demand of ourselves. America respects life, liberty and property. As does our brother in Australia. That history showcases our imperfections and flaws is not up for debate. But it is is our present too. All the imperfections of colonial Australia are being multiplied right now in the Bronx; in the antisemitic-fueled racism faced by Ritchie Torres. Yet it is the respect that wider America (now) affords to people of colour like the Congressman that legitimates their nation and makes its laws and sovereignty worthy of obedience.

Would an Aztec superpower act like Australia? Or an Aboriginal one? These are questions that, shall we say, are open to debate. Fortunately Australia and America under their current sovereigns are tolerate powers that respect our natural rights; self-determination for all including the indigenous. So let’s keep their feet to fire; we can start by demanding immediate action to stamp out antisemitism. But let’s not incinerate them with unfounded guilt.

Conclusion

So to conclude, when we speak of this issue, we speak in post-20th Century terms. War, expansion and the taking of territory (and therefore sovereignty) was practised by every people and every ethnicity in every corner of the world for almost all of human history. It was the law of the jungle. It was the law of might is right. Everyone did it from the Aztecs to the Aborginal peoples to the European nations to the Asian nomads.

Now and only now are we are (slightly) more civilised as a human race. There are still territorial disputes, but these are a relative rarity. However, what we must all understand is that land belonged to nobody at its inception. It became owned purely through the process of property as described by Locke — and this was a natural right of liberty that was ours as a treasure long before the coming of the United Nations Charter. It was our birthright since the dawn of time.

When the first hunter-gatherers settled and the first Nomads raised flocks, they gained property rights. And only tyrants would take those rights away. Tyrants that came to haunt us in the Soviet Union, but that are far from power in the USA and Australia.

Every Englishman’s home is his castle. It is his. And it may not be taken away by the British sovereign lest his rights be destroyed. For Sovereignty is one thing and Property is another.

And this article is mine. My efforts make it so.